Join us at the Monarch Tavern (12 Clinton St) on Thursday, January 9th at 7-9pm to hear these awesome writers share their work from our newest issue!

Simina Banu enjoys investigating the way meaning falls into the crevices—between people and across languages. She’s propelled by a fascination with pop music, consumerism, and advertising. She’s written two chapbooks: where art (words(on)pages press) and Tomorrow, adagio (above/ ground press). POP—her first full length collection of poetry—is forthcoming with Coach House Books. She lives in Montreal.

Elena Bentley lives in Saskatoon (on Treaty 6 Territory and the homeland of the Métis), and holds a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Toronto. When she isn’t reading, writing, or working, she’s probably singing. Elena is very grateful that her first published poems have found a home inside this issue of untethered.

Marshall Gu was born and raised from Toronto. After graduating from University of Toronto in 2013, he pursued an MBA at Ryerson and is now working in the financial district. In his spare time, he has published music criticism through websites such as Popmatters and Pretty Much Amazing and has had a short story published through The Dalhousie Review and poetry published in the Spadina Literary Review.

Hege Jakobsen Lepri is a Norwegian-Canadian translator and writer. She returned to writing in 2011 and had her first story published in English in J Journal in 2013. She has since been published widely in Canada and the US. Her most recent work is featured or forthcoming in The New Quarterly, Carve Literary Magazine, Hobart, Agnes and True, Journal of Compressed Arts, Gone Lawn, Belletrist, Crack the Spine, PRISM international, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @hegelincanada, Instagram @hege.a.j.lepri, and on her website hegeajlepri.ca.

Margaret Lynch is writing a memoir about life and love after cancer. Excerpts about her Camino pilgrimage have been broadcast on CBC Radio (The Sunday Edition and This Happened to Me), and her essay about life after cancer was published in the Toronto Star. She began writing her memoir in 2015, following a successful digital marketing career working with major brands in private sector and non-profit organizations. She holds a creative writing certificate from the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto and is currently completing her creative non-fiction MFA at the University of King’s College in Halifax.

Tanis MacDonald’s fourth book of poetry, Mobile, was published by Book*hug in Fall 2019. She is the author of six books of poetry and essays, including Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City (Wolsak and Wynn 2018) and is a co-editor of GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times (Frontenac Press 2018). Her work has appeared recently in The New Quarterly, FreeFall, CV2, Prairie Fire, and in the anthology Against Death (Anvil Press 2019). She lives in Waterloo, Ontario.

Diana Manole is a Romanian-Canadian scholar, literary translator, and award-winning author of nine books of poetry and drama in her native Romania. Her poetry in English has been published in magazines and anthologies in Europe, the UK, the US, Mexico, South Africa, and Canada, and in the English-Romanian book B&W (Tracus Arte 2015). Her second bilingual collection of poems will be published in Canada by Grey Borders Books in 2020.

Lori A. May is the author of several books, including The Write Crowd: Literary Citizenship & the Writing Life (Bloomsbury). She writes across the genres and her work may be found in publications including The Atlantic, Brevity, Midwestern Gothic, and Writer’s Digest. Lori teaches in the University of King’s College-Halifax creative non-fiction MFA program. At present, she is finalizing a collection of essays.

Victoria Mbabazi is a mental health major pursuing a double minor in creative writing and philosophy at the University of Toronto. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in CV2, Release Any Words Stuck Inside of You II, Feel Ways, and the Liminal Women Anthology. Her work has also been longlisted in Room’s Poetry Contest and shortlisted in Plenitude’s Flash Writing contest. She is currently working on a poetry collection.

Deborah Igbe Ocholi is a first generation Nigerian-Canadian raised in Calgary but currently residing in Toronto. She writes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction and makes sure to embed a little bit of home within each piece.

A. A. Parr is a Canadian artist, writer, and entrepreneur with a BFA from York University. Her debut poetry chapbook, What Lasts Beyond the Burning is forthcoming from Nightingale & Sparrow Press, December 2020. Her creative works have been seen on stages, in galleries, and in print throughout North America over the past two decades. Currently, she is working on her second literary fiction novel while writing a weekly online series of poetry about strangers entitled I Wrote You This Poem. In her work, she seeks to explore difficult themes in an attempt to shine a necessary light into our darkest crevices.